Why software development slows to a crawl

An engineer refreshes a pull request page for the fourth time. New comments appear. More reviewers get tagged. The change has been ready for days, yet the approval waits.

The scenario is familiar across the industry: code that takes 15 minutes to write but 15 days to get approved. The frustration isn’t rooted in disagreement about quality or safety. Engineers want to ship something straightforward, yet find themselves navigating comments, reviews, alignment meetings, and status threads.

If you’ve ever watched a pull request spend more time in discussion than it took to build the feature, you’ve seen the quiet cost of process at scale. Governance starts with good intent. It brings clarity and protects quality. But beyond a certain point, it dilutes ownership, slows execution, and drains morale.

Software organizations don’t slow down because people stop caring. They slow down because responsibility diffuses across owners, reviewers, and committees, while the work required to push anything forward grows heavier each quarter. The challenge for leaders is to continuously tune governance so that clarity and speed increase together.

The scaling ownership trap

The pattern plays out similarly across companies scaling past a few hundred engineers. Early on, things move quickly because ownership is clear. Then growth creates new pressures. A deployment causes an outage and leadership adds oversight. A security vulnerability reaches production and suddenly every change requires security review.

Each response makes sense in isolation. The problem emerges when organizations keep adding layers without removing them. Architecture review boards and launch readiness checklists accumulate without pruning and expand to include every senior voice. The deeper drivers are often emotional. Visible incidents trigger overcorrection with multiple sign-off layers to assuage anxiety. Quality teams get rewarded for preventing risk rather than enabling speed. Having a process becomes a symbol of managerial competence.

Academic analysis of over half a million GitHub records across about two thousand high-activity open-source repositories revealed something striking. Repositories with more than 10 owners took more than three times as long to merge changes compared to those with one or two clear owners (source). As ownership becomes broad, accountability becomes thin. Each reviewer assumes others will catch issues. Merge times crater while quality stays flat.

Consider an operational readiness review where invitations to senior engineers and technical leads have created a standing meeting with 10 to 15 people. The bigger these meetings get, the more cumbersome the decision-making becomes. When pared down to a smaller group with one senior engineer who actually owns the approval, nothing breaks. Outcomes improve because clear accountability drives careful judgment, while diffused responsibility invites assumptions that someone else will catch the issues.

Why processes must evolve, not fossilize

Teams fall into a trap where a once-useful rule becomes a tradition, then a barrier. When someone asks why a particular approval exists, the answer becomes circular: because that’s our process.

Good governance adapts to current needs, not historical ones. For every process gate, someone should articulate what specific risk it mitigates and what would happen without it. If the answer is “we’ve always done it this way,” the gate needs reevaluation.

The most successful engineering cultures build in mechanisms for process retirement. Any new process comes with an expiration date. After six or 12 months, the rule is automatically retired unless someone actively argues for renewal with data showing its necessity. Every rule must have a documented owner and a one-sentence justification. If the current team cannot state the why, the process should be retired.

Five practical ways to keep speed and ownership high

Here are some practical ways to keep governance mechanisms fine-tuned and ensure that processes remain nimble.

Limit ownership to those truly accountable

For significant projects, identify a small group of two to three people genuinely accountable for outcomes. Track merge and review latency as governance health signals. Design team boundaries that minimize coordination requirements, ensuring architectural boundaries align with organizational boundaries.

Create pathways for low-risk work to move fast

Not all changes carry equal risk. Allow routine updates like documentation, test changes, and reversible configs to bypass long cycles through single-reviewer approval, self-service deployment, and automated scanning. Make clear what triggers the exception path for high-risk changes.

Keep reviewer circles small and purposeful

For most changes, limit reviewers to two to three people with direct context. Broader visibility should be the exception, reserved for changes that introduce new architectural patterns or require cross-organizational alignment. For those cases, use decision notes like architecture decision records to inform stakeholders without requiring everyone’s approval. Set short comment windows measured in days, not weeks, and make clear who owns the final decision.

Assign a single responsible merger for each change

Designate one person responsible for merging each change. Even when multiple reviewers are needed, only one person should own the decision and timeline. Set decision deadlines, not consensus requirements. This avoids waiting for consensus that may never arrive.

Treat escalation as efficiency, not conflict

When a decision stalls beyond your team’s expected review SLA, encourage fast escalation to a lead or architect. Escalation should be praised, not avoided.

The human and cultural cost of unnecessary layers

The most corrosive effect of inefficient governance isn’t lost velocity. It’s the impact on people.

Talented engineers gradually lose their spark in organizations with too many review layers. They spend months shepherding a feature through review cycles, reshaped by feedback from six different stakeholders. By the time the code ships, the original builder barely recognizes it.

This is when optimization shifts from impact to approval. Engineers stop taking pride in elegant solutions or proposing ambitious ideas because coordination costs are prohibitive. They become contractors executing someone else’s vision instead of builders creating something new.

The fastest way to crush the spirit of innovation in development teams is to reward alignment theater over creation impact. When engineers spend more time on pre-meeting preparation, stakeholder management emails, and presentation polishing than on building and validating solutions, the incentive structure has inverted. And the best ones leave.

The governance health check
Warning signs your process has become the problem

Merge times have doubled or tripled over the past year
Engineers spend more time in review cycles than writing code
Nobody can explain why certain approvals exist
Team morale drops as builders feel more like coordinators than creators
The same types of incidents keep happening despite more process

Monthly actions to keep governance lean

Track: Merge time, review latency, non-coding time percentage, architecture review alignment
Ask: What process can we retire this quarter? Would it have an impact? How crucial is it?
Review: Which processes have we retired in the last six months? Has it helped or created an issue?
Test: Can we name who owns each decision and why they’re accountable?
Challenge: Can we automate this approval or build it into tooling?

How large teams can move like small teams

Great organizations preserve small-team speed as they scale by focusing on autonomy and clear boundaries. The guiding principles: Hire people you trust, set clear boundaries around security requirements, architectural principles, and compliance rules, then let teams work independently within those boundaries.

Design team structures that minimize coordination. Align team boundaries with system boundaries so teams can build, test, and deploy independently. When architectural ownership matches organizational ownership, teams spend less time aligning and more time shipping.

Use automation to make the safest path also the easiest one. For example, build core security checks directly into the deployment process, such as automatic scanning and audit logging that run quietly in the background. This allows teams to deploy with confidence, resulting in faster delivery without lowering security.

Before adding a new approval process, ask if the real problem is technical debt, weak testing, or fragile architecture. Brittle systems create fear, and fear drives people to add defensive process layers. Fixing the underlying system is better than adding more reviews.

When governance is too light

The goal is not zero governance. Mature systems need architectural consistency, security review for high-risk changes, and compliance processes in regulated contexts. Warning signs of under-governance include repeated incidents of the same type, accumulating technical debt due to inconsistent decisions, or engineers making choices without understanding system-wide constraints. Match governance to team maturity, with explicit plans to reduce constraints as judgment develops.

The continuous audit

Make governance review a regular discipline. Every six months, list every required approval step, recurring meeting, and process gate. Then ask: if we were starting from scratch today, would we create this? About a third of the time, typically, the answer is no.

If you’re inheriting a governance mess, start by instrumenting the pain. Track merge times, review latency, and the percentage of time engineers spend coding versus waiting in review cycles. Then tackle the highest-leverage process first. Usually, this is the process with the worst signal-to-noise ratio, where reviews rarely find issues but always create delay.

Focus pruning efforts on discretionary process, not compliance-required gates in regulated environments.

Choosing speed over theater

The hardest part of right-sizing governance is saying no to people with good intentions. The senior architect who wants to review every database change genuinely cares about data integrity. But caring isn’t the same as adding value.

Software organizations are living systems. Governance must evolve, shrink, and adapt just as quickly as code and culture do. We advance not by asking how much process to add, but by asking whether a rule still earns its place.

Process exists to serve builders. When the process becomes the work, the work suffers. The most effective leaders don’t celebrate the size of their governance system. They celebrate the speed and confidence of their teams.

True ownership isn’t assigned. It’s protected.